The easiest route to delivering communication for development projects is to simplify complexity, plan activities that are measurable and that conform to established registers of monitoring and meaning. This leads to an abundance of behaviour change projects, with information packaged and delivered at scale, and serves only to place the emphasis for change on de-contextualised and abstracted individuals rather than suboptimal or oppressive social, economic and political systems and structures. Measurement is a requirement of development policy making, spending and planning, and thus a form of power. This power subverts knowledge about development and social change and militates against development that is meaningful, except in the terms of agreed measures. Technocratic knowledge feeds into and underpins forms of development governance. Universal logic and rules built upon market-driven incentives and law subsume places and relations through formulaic processes and categories. In this framework of expertise and control, communities and citizens are conceived through a neoliberal rationality of what we might think of as ‘technocratic optimization.

---

Prof. Jo Tacchi is a media anthropologist who led a number of complex, multi-country research projects and developed ethnographic and action research approaches and methodologies that have been taken up globally. Her research is mostly concerned with communication and development. She has developed methodologies that combine ethnographic principles with action research cycles, and is the author of Evaluating Communication for Development (2013 Earthscan, Routledge), and Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practices (2016 Sage). Her co-edited volume (with Thomas Tufte), Communicating for Change: Concepts to Think With, Palgrave Macmillan will be out shortly. Her current work explores issues of voice and participation in relation to information and communication technologies (ICT), media and development, education and active citizenship, and capacity development in relation to evaluation of communication and development.